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A few Notes on Foucault

I've almost always been in a habit of reading. When I was younger, I spent a
lot of time in the library. I'd just grab an entire series of novels, and read
them all, right in a row. Sometimes I'd end up reading non-fiction too. I
ended up with a lot of books on software.

Then my local library got Internet access. Slowly, I started to spend less
time in the stacks and more in front of a terminal. This wasn't a bad thing; I
still kept reading. What's more, what was previously a one way street turned
into two: I didn't just read the Internet, I wrote it. I spent hours and hours
discussing the things I'd read with others.

In any case, as the years flew by, the things that I've been reading have
become less and less substantial. Current events are fine and all, and
pictures of cute cats are nice, but I feel like the volume of what I've been
reading has gone up, but the quality has gone down. It happens. I can't really
be snide about not owning a TV while being subscribed to
/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu. Reddit somehow has morphed into a place where you
can feel superior, but it's really just the same exact thing in different
clothing. Combine this general unease with my aspirations for grad school in
the fall, as well as my renewed interest in political philosophy, and my need
to hit the books has become readily apparent.

Luckily, I have an ally in this quest, and Jamie has given me a reading list.
Since reading and writing are two sides of a single coin, I'll be writing
about the things that I read here. Like many other things I've written about
in the past, I'm sure that putting my thoughts down on paper (?) will help to
gel my understanding and thoughts. First up: Michel Foucault's "Discipline and
Punish."

I'll get right to it: I really enjoyed reading this book. It's partially
because it took a lot of random things that I kind of knew and tied them to
some experiences that I've had in a meaningful way. It's also partially
because I have a substantial infatuation with the conspiratorial; I re-read
"1984" every year, and I often think about its all-knowing, all-seeing
telescreen imagery when discussing anything vaguely political. "Discipline and
Punish" gave me the same sort of images, but they were fewer, and more firmly
rooted in history and reality. The book opens with a section named "Torture,"
and the scene of Robert-François Damiens' punishments for attempted regicide.
I'm sure that before the release of "Saw," these images were even more
shocking:

... he was to be 'taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burningwax weighing two pounds'; then, 'in the said cart, to the Place de Greve, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs, and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax, and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes, and his ashes thrown to the winds.

Let it never be said that the people of 1757 were not thorough. Regardless, by
January of 1840, we'd transitioned to a prison system that looks pretty much
the same as it does now. The book's primary theme is discussing how we got
from point A to point B, and then examining the 'why' to explain how modern
society has a new sovereign institution: the 'carceral system.'

Before we can examine that question, though, we need to ask why we used
torture as a form of punishment in the first place. The reasoning is actually
straightforward: during the period of monarchy, everything revolves around the
monarch. He is sovereign in a more absolute way than we even initially think
of; the pop-culture image of a king has more to do with something of a
popularity contest or that he's simply the guy on the top of the pyramid, but
the nature of a monarch's power runs more deeply than that. It was called
'divine right' for a reason, the physical body of the sovereign was the
representation of God himself, and since the entire world belongs to God, thus
it belongs to and is a part of the monarch. It reminds me of the kind of
doublethink necessary to grasp the Catholic conception of the Holy Trinity, in
this case God the Father, the king his son, and the world rather than a Holy
Ghost. All one, yet three at the same time. In any case, if the land itself is
the literal body of the king, then any transgression is an act of defiance not
only of the rule of the monarch, but is making war upon God himself. And since
damage has been done to the body of God, so must an equivalent exchange be
made with the body of the aggressor. Torture also has an element of the
theatrical to it, and therefore demonstrates to all of those watching that
they must also comply with the rule of law or face the consequences.

However, eventually, torture became socially inconvenient. Basically, it was a
case of the Streisand Effect: when you place that much attention on someone,
you create a forum for sympathizers to create romantic images of their fallen
hero. There's a great historical example of this in the Christian mythos:
consider the polarizing effect that Christ's torture on the cross maintains to
this day. History is littered with the songs of fallen heros, and a call to
follow in their stead. Eventually, whenever a new convict was to be strung up
at a gallows, there'd be a state of disarray. Foucault describes several
images of rioters throwing stones and even in some cases killing the
executioner.

As a result of this, the nature of punishment slowly changed. Reformists
argued that punishment was metered out unevenly, and inconsistently. Thus in
the same way that monarchy gave way to democracy, the absolute right of the
king to punish became distributed as well. However, centralized and
distributed systems are quite different, and require different constructs to
operate properly. Therefore, a distributed form of the right to punish would
need some mechanism by which to operate. This mechanism is termed "discipline"
by Foucault. Discipline creates a certain order all by itself, and he uses a
great example of monks and monasteries to illustrate the concept of
discipline. Think about all of these things that we consider virtuous:

Studying is a disciplined form of reading

Dieting is discipline applied to eating

The image of a soldier is almost entirely one of discipline

Morality is discipline applied to all of life

Exercise is disciplined form of the body

But discipline has even greater roots in our society. Think about Taylor's
Scientific Management, for example: it's a means of imposing discipline on
workers to maximize their production. Schooling is a way of giving children a
'structured environment' (structure seems to be synonymous with discipline in
many cases) to develop in. Churches are places for the soul to become
disciplined.

Submitting to discipline has deeper psychological effects as well. It creates
the idea of a division: there's those who follow the rules, and those that
disregard them. And since we've established that those who follow the rules
are virtuous, those who don't must not be. Since those that don't follow the
rules are doing bad things, they should be subject to punishment, so that they
can remain disciplined. And thus the system of rules can be used as the
distributed form of this right to punish, replacing the absolute right of the
monarch. Submitting to this mentality makes people into 'docile bodies' that
perfectly fit into this worldview.

As an example of how far this disciplinary approach has gone, Foucault
presents the Panopticon, which was a prison shaped like a pie, with a tower in
the middle. Prisoners would be able to observe others directly across from
themselves, and the guard who may or may not be in the tower would be able to
watch all of the prisoners at once. Since you couldn't tell if the guard was
in the tower or not, discipline would become internalized, since you always
had to assume that Big Brother is watching you... This way of thinking about
society ends up creating an all-encompassing 'carceral system' that we now
live in.

It's also important to note that this carceral system is total and absolutely
permeating every aspect of society, yet they aren't presented as such.
Foucault specifically mentions that it's important to consider that the
delinquent are still a part of the system, and not outside of it. Yet we're
constantly presented with images that serve to present the idea that there's a
'criminal underworld,' that those who lead a life of crime are part of a
shadowy alternate universe. Foucault refers to this idea as 'enclosure':
"Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place
heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected
space of disciplinary monotony." The enclosure embodies this separation, since
there's a space both within and outside of the enclosure. A self and an Other.

... so yeah. That's my summary. I'm still digesting a lot of this stuff, and
so I may have more to say about it later.